Business Intelligence Automation Best Practices – A Quick Guide
We are living in an age of unprecedented technological progress where businesses need to be smart, quick and agile. Digital advancement has revolutionized our everyday life, and the impact being felt in the business world is no exception.
Gaining an edge over competitors in today’s era requires making critical decisions, and this is where BI and its associated tools come into play.
However, BI is more than just software; it’s an umbrella term for keeping a holistic view of all the relevant business data. Its implementation means a myriad of benefits for the company, starting from better analysis of data to providing a competitive edge in the market. The whole purpose of BI is to facilitate better business decisions.
Business Intelligence Automation
Business Intelligence (BI) Automation plays a crucial role in making better data-driven decisions, which ultimately leads to better access, opportunities, and technological advancements in the field. It combines data analysis, reporting capabilities, and data visualization to gain actionable insight from data and delivers it to managers or executives to help make tactical business strategies.
BI automation and its software support a wide range of business demands and allow every employee to access insight regardless of their technical skills easily. This helps in making operations more productive and efficient, which gives the company an edge against its competitors in the market.
The BI automation practices highlighted below are industry standards that will enable any company to achieve significant efficiency and awareness and, if followed properly, will eventually pave the path to its ongoing success.
1. Get Company-Wide Buy-In
Moving forward with a BI enterprise without adopting the initiative universally is a quick path to BI failure. It is important to secure the organization-wide buy-in, to maximize the chances of success. So, this practice includes acquiring sponsors from administrators and involves every key decision maker, end user, or stakeholder in tactical planning and collaborative efforts to guarantee that each party concerned is in agreement on key enterprise objectives.
For example, the collaboration between IT and Dev teams can offer valuable knowledge bases that can be utilized and ensure that appropriate security measures are adhered to. IT is also an excellent resource for the retention of knowledge and data transfer. Achieving investment in the early stages of the BI process helps to provide clarity and gathers a company-wide focus for a successful BI implementation.
2. Create a BI Strategy
Before BI implementation, it is important to map out a strategy. Successful business approach intelligence requires gaining input and a proper understanding of the company needs of every wing – from the warehouse to the C-suit. This includes planning for scalability while establishing a ground for technological and reporting demands. Introducing a BI approach without blueprinting a thoroughly-thought coordinated roadmap regarding the implementation could end up hampering the efficiency of the process and cost more money, time, and hindrance.
Hence, before investing the resources, it is important to outline the responsibility of each task to make it clear what each individual’s role is in the wider plan. Invest time to determine what areas of the business can benefit from BI automation the most. Then, create a strategy with concise and distinct objectives that outlines measurable outcomes for your BI efforts.
3. Use Customer Data to Identify User Personas
Companies can make more informed and data-driven decisions by harnessing the right data at the right time to identify the user’s personas. Customers will engage with the company through different channels now and then, making it possible for you to analyze and monitor their activity on the website to anticipate and predict their future behavior.
However, a personalization strategy requires a delicate balance between using data to boost relevancy in customer experience and respecting their data privacy signals.
The analysis will allow the company to segment the audience beyond the demographic and psychographic profile, enabling it to hyper-personalize its customer experience. Building and sharing customer reports with others in the company can help in sparking innovative ideas, which could potentially lead the company to its success.
4. Designate the Reporting Requirements
Identifying the target audience of your report is the first thing to do when making your business intelligent. So, this practice includes creating an exhaustive list of all the stakeholders and decision-makers for the report that will give you a rough idea about the target audience for the company deliverables.
Schedule a meeting or an interview with all the company’s stakeholders and decision-makers to figure out all the reporting requirements. After that, choose the data visualization styles and dashboard types along with the report format, depending on the technical skills of the end users. Doing this will help you identify the conflicting or contradicting requirements and even make it possible for you to resolve them upfront.
5. Design Dashboard
A dashboard is one of the most crucial tools in business intelligence reporting. Simplicity, clarity, and consistency are the few things to keep in mind when designing a dashboard. The most important of them is the curation of an analysis that is as brief and simplified as possible. This will enable the customers to extrapolate the trends and substantial data points without any difficulty.
Locate elements with the most important benchmarks at the top layout of the dashboard, with more detailed analysis progressing downwards. The elements should concisely deliver answers to questions and represent data in a proper format to display primary trends in a precise manner. The main purpose of business intelligence reporting is to allow the audience to obtain underlying patterns from data that provide actionable insight without any delay.
6. Establish a Data Culture
Establishing a data culture is a challenge that many organizations are currently facing. However, to have BI succeed in a business model, fostering a data culture is of the utmost importance. Not only does a data-driven culture value statistical data in decision-making, but it also embraces a much-needed culture of innovation. When each individual in the company works together towards a common goal, the result and actions will prove to be more beneficial for both; the company and the employees.
Data culture can offer a series of significant advantages for businesses in various industries. It gives a spur to constant improvement across the staff, making it easier to achieve bigger milestones. That being said, the company will need to acknowledge the importance of data to get itself on board with the new BI plan.
7. Start Small, Aim Big
Chances are, there are many questions you need to answer, a lot of insight you need to gain, and several decisions you need to make. It is easy to get overwhelmed when you start to compile these requirements and start pondering the overall size of the data. However, business intelligence is a step-by-step journey that requires incredible patience and discipline to prove fruitful.
Therefore, shorten the list of queries to answers and focus on the important ones. Start with a small list of crucial questions and try to answer them with the available data. Implement small milestones that will progress as your strategy does. Maintaining a balance between priorities and longevity will further help you build an environment that fosters innovation and efficiency.
Final thoughts
Implementing Business Intelligence Automation and incorporating BI technologies in your business model is a tried-and-tested path to success for all industries. However, an undefined and poorly thought-out strategy can quite possibly lead to confusion. Educating yourself about different practices and approaches for automating your business through BI is equally important.
Regardless of where you are in your BI journey, At RTS Labs, we’ll help you get to the next step and identify your biggest tech wins. Let’s start with a call to discuss how to improve your technology and where you’ll see the biggest wins. No obligation, no selling.